


Nor breathe, nor stir

by Naraht



Series: In that dark womb [2]
Category: Return to Night - Mary Renault
Genre: 1940s, Abortion, F/M, Gen, Medical Procedures, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-25
Updated: 2014-11-11
Packaged: 2018-02-18 18:35:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2358059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1560389">In that dark womb</a>, a fortnight later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lilliburlero](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/gifts).



> Written to a prompt by Lilliburlero.

"One rather assumed it would be a bit more back alley than this," said Hilary curiously, looking around the operating room. "Even Harley Street."

She was speaking merely for the sake of something to say; it occurred to her afterwards that she would have been far better talking about the weather. She started to take off her tweed jacket. One sleeve stuck - due to wartime austerity, she had removed rather than replaced an irremediably ripped silk lining - and she was involved in an undignified tussle, which David had the decency to ignore.

David preserved his usual tone of light, sardonic amusement. "I also make house calls, _in extremis_. As medically determined through an examination of the patient's bank balance. But I thought you would prefer the nursing home."

Hilary shrugged. The time had been difficult to carve out of her own working schedule; she had settled on a Friday and determined to tell any inquirers that she was taking a weekend in London, which was perfectly true as far as it went. She was not particularly looking forward to convalescing in a private nursing home, which she associated with hypochondria and the elderly, though this particular specimen in Roehampton - for which she was paying handsomely - had much of the charm and comfort of a country hotel.

"Aren't you worried about prosecution?"

Having spoken absentmindedly when she thought she was inspecting the floral wallpaper, she winced again. With anyone else her bluntness would have been unforgivable - certainly in her current, tenuous position - but it was the way that she had always talked with David, and it was easy to fall back into the un-squeamish, practical tones of the clinician.

"In theory? Yes. In practice? You're booked in for a curettage to diagnose and treat menometrorrhagia in perimenopause. Perfectly legal."

Hilary would have objected to being described as perimenopausal, except that at the moment it seemed far preferable to the alternative.

"If I _had_ abnormal bleeding."

It was pure reflex, a catching and tossing back the conversational ball of the sort that they had once practiced over appalling coffee in the housemen's common room. As graven in her memory as the revision for her MRCS, Hilary could still envision the overlapping, ringed coffee stains on that old table - along with other stains, less easily identified, which were the subject of familiarly predictable ribaldry. She felt a pang of nostalgia for those days, which in retrospect had assumed a simplicity in her mind that they had not possessed at the time.

"Thanks to Dr. Bourne, we've other options. But I had assumed you mightn't want the usual bother of a psychiatric consultation." David assumed a sententious air which had matured since his days as a houseman, and which Hilary considered rather overdone. "In any case, my professional opinion is that it would be dangerous for you to carry a pregnancy to term. For an elderly primipara over forty... well, childbirth is always a risky business. A therapeutic procedure, for the preservation of health."

 _An impressive performance_ , thought Hilary. _No doubt his patients love him. I wonder how it would play in the dock._ This she did not say aloud, for the thought of performance brought Julian - whom she had hitherto repressed from her consciousness - to mind immediately. 

Only three days previously she had received from him a lengthy letter, brimming with love and devotion and, apart from the theatrical, almost entirely devoid of content. A charitable woman would have attributed this latter to wartime censorship. Hilary was not charitable; moreover she had received letters from Julian before the war and there was no discernible difference between them. Sitting down to read, she had been struck both by Julian's evident homesickness - for during the war he had never been stationed outside England - and by the fact that he had alluded neither to their encounter in London nor to the hopes that he had so delicately expressed that evening.

Hilary's initial blind fury had dissipated over the past weeks, replaced by a sickening doubt which was, for her, even more difficult to bear. Had Julian meant what he said, or had it merely been one of the pleasant fantasies in which he too often still indulged? How would he greet the news if she told him? Despite the lapse of years she thought it only too likely that he would react with the same poorly-hidden dismay that he had shown in her own surgery back in 1939. If she could have seen him face to face, she might well have tested the hypothesis, even at the risk that he might beg her to reconsider. But Julian was halfway around the world; a letter would take weeks by round trip if it arrived at all and, from Julian's pen, would hardly be conclusive. There was no time and no choice to be made other than her own.

All her conversation and all of her doubts were, she realised, no more than a delaying tactic.

"Well," she said, rubbing her palms together briskly, "I'm in your hands. Shall we?"


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains a relatively detailed description of a first trimester abortion.

"Local is enough," said Hilary, after refusing the twilight sedation that David had offered as a matter of course. "I'd rather be fully conscious."

David shook his head doubtfully. "Promise me - _promise_ me, Hilary - that you'll lie back, relax and leave everything to me."

"I've heard that from you before, you know."

"I never..." David began, then stopped dead.

Against her will, a wry smile tugged at the corners of Hilary's mouth.

 _My God,_ she thought instantly. _What sort of monster must I be, that I could joke about something like this?_

But she could not think what else she could do. She was not a good patient; thankfully she had not often found herself in that position. 

Role. Julian would have called it a role. Hilary winced. _Flat on my back,_ she thought.

"Now I'll insert the speculum," said David, a low impersonal tone, a lecturer in the theatre for an audience of one. "It might be a little cold."

"Go on," said Hilary.

Really it was only a matter of courtesy to call it a surgical procedure at all. No general anaesthesia necessary; if it were not for an excess of caution it could have been performed in a country G.P.'s office. She refused to be impressed by any common misapprehension of the dangers involved. In the hands of any qualified, moderately skilled practitioner it was a trivial matter, and David's skill and - if he were to believed - experience went a good bit beyond that. If she were performing the procedure herself, as she wished she were, she would not have had a better chance at a satisfactory outcome. Perhaps it was this which galled her.

"Just applying the antiseptic now. After that I'll perform the paracervical block."

"You needn't narrate. I'm perfectly aware of what's involved."

She had, in fact, refreshed her memory with the aid of one of her medical texts a few days earlier, telling herself that it was a matter of perfectly sensible curiosity. She had not learnt anything that she did not already know; the same was true from David's narrative, though she supposed that she ought to be grateful to be treated as a medical student, if the alternative was to be simply another patient - reassured, sedated and ignored.

"I'm sorry," she added, rather shortly. "I'd prefer if you didn't, that's all."

She could feel her bare toes tensing, a purely involuntary reaction, and hoped against hope that David would not notice.

"As you like," said David. "I'll carry on, then."

Hilary lay still, her damp hands tangling in the surgical drape, staring fixedly up at the Edwardian plaster mouldings of the ceiling. Despite the procaine she could clearly feel the cervical dilation, then the scrape and tug of the curette itself. It did hurt; one could not deny that - though she would likely have done so if asked directly. Perhaps the sweat beading on her forehead was indication enough. 

In her mind's eye she manipulated the instruments herself, delicately running the curette along the uterine wall. She glanced down at David, intently absorbed in his work, his dark eyebrows coming together in a slight frown of concentration. In that moment she liked him better than she had done in a long while. It seemed to her that they worked in unison, side by side, as they had never done during their years at the Clyde Summers.

"There," he said finally. "Beautiful."

It was a word that he had never, in her memory, applied to her before.

The whole operation had not taken long; less than ten minutes according to her watch. Hilary sighed, let her head fall to the side, her cheek against the pillow. 

"I don't suppose you ever thought that you ever thought you would be doing this for me."

It was the release of tension; speaking for the sake of something to say. She was as displeased with herself as if she had been babbling under ether.

"Actually," said David, "I had considered it. One ought to be prepared for the consequences of one's acts. Thankfully the necessity never presented itself."

She raised her head from the pillow. "Had you really? Would you have done?"

As a young house surgeon she had considered herself a modern woman and knowledgable in the ways of the world, though she had been a virgin when she met David. She had worn a diaphragm and used pessaries; they had been particularly careful when her cycle indicated it. Among the nursing staff there had been no shortage of gossip about sudden marriages, dark hints about the abstraction of ergot from the medicines cupboard, and frantic, hushed discussion of what remained to be done if both of these avenues failed; indeed, one ward sister had resigned in disgrace during Hilary's tenure in neurosurgery. Nonetheless Hilary had never seriously considered the possibility that she herself, despite all their precautions, might fall victim to her own biology no less than might a nurse. In retrospect she was embarrassed at her own naivety, and her own arrogance.

"It hardly matters now," said David.

He straightened up, wincing slightly and shrugging his shoulders. In one hand he held the steel dish that had rested between her legs during the procedure.

"I'll just go next door to examine the tissue. Then, if everything is as expected, I'll ask the nurse to give you a dose of ergot to help the uterus to contract, and you'll be well rid of me."

"Don't sit up yet," he added, for Hilary had begun to prop herself up on one elbow.

"But I should like to see for myself."

"Hilary," he said warningly. 

"I don't see why not."

"Don't you..."

"Of course I have feelings," interrupted Hilary before he could say more. "But that's not the point."

"I never doubted your having feelings," said David dryly. "What I was about to say was, don't you trust me?"

There was no way she could express the fact that she had trusted him already, more than he knew, more than anyone else. She had come to him for help; she had told no one besides him. Once upon a time she would have confided in Lisa, but Lisa was dead. Hilary blinked away the memory, looked steadily at him, and said nothing.

"If you insist," he said. "There's nothing much to see at this stage anyway."

He came around to her side with the dish and they studied its contents together. There was not so much blood. David, after brief consideration, indicated a small piece of tissue with the curette.

"Gestational sac," he said simply. "And the chorionic villi. All perfectly in order, wouldn't you say?"

Hilary nodded, fascinated. "Yes. Yes, of course."

Apart from a certain dizziness, already beginning to pass away, all she felt was relief combined with the mild, familiar pleasure of scientific curiosity satisfied. Gazing downwards into the dish she wondered whether there ought to be more. Perhaps medicine and surgery had hardened her; she was grateful to have seen for herself, but could not stir herself to anything more definite. Perhaps she was simply tired.

"There you are," said David. "I've gone well beyond professional courtesy, I hope you'll agree. Now I'll take this away and look at it properly. And for God's sake, Hilary, lie down before I send the nurse in, or she'll have my head."

Hilary obeyed this time. "Yes. Thank you, David."

He had put down the dish to strip off his gloves and had not taken it up again. He studied her. For a moment she wondered whether he would reach out to touch her, resting his hand upon her shoulder or clasping her own in reassurance. She hoped not; such a nod to emotion from David now would be a gesture of condescension, more than she could bear. All she wanted now was to be alone.

He only nodded at her, brief and neutral, and then withdrew.

Hilary lay on her side on the table, feeling a trickle of blood beginning to soak into the pad between her legs. No more than one would expect; he had done his job well.

 _It's done,_ she thought. And then, for no reason she could discern, _he does respect me after all._

**Author's Note:**

> Another title (mis)quoting from John Masefield's 'To his mother.'
> 
> Of particular help with the medical detail here were the resources offered by the International Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology on [maternal health](http://www.glowm.com/FIGO_resources).


End file.
